Specifically, the beds were stiff and too small. A few players developed back soreness. A couple of headlines emerged.

“And that was the last day of camp,” tight end Martellus Bennett said. “Somebody should’ve complained about it earlier. They would’ve done something about it.”

The rest of the football universe yawned.

The ho-hum Giants have managed to avoid any major controversy heading into this season. Instead they watched with bemusement as the Jets turned their training camp home in Cortland, N.Y., into a story generator for the N.F.L.’s preseason news cycle.

“I think we prefer it that way,” wide receiver Victor Cruz said. “We like to fly under the radar and do our work in silence. Once we start piling together some wins, that’s when the accolades come. We like to just play our game.”

The Giants will be the visiting team at MetLife Stadium on Saturday night when they face the Jets in the second preseason game for both teams. They will enter the game almost overlooked, even though their roster remains largely unchanged from the one that won the Super Bowl in February.

Photo

All the attention the Jets have received led Eli Manning to joke that he felt like the third most popular quarterback in the city.Credit
Kathy Willens/Associated Press

Some players are gone, including running back Brandon Jacobs, who had been one of the team’s more vocal members. His comments about the Jets were a topic of conversation in the Giants’ locker room Thursday.

“It’s a circus, man,” Jacobs told CBSSports.com, adding, “I’m just so tired of reading and hearing of everything over there, and it’s mid-August.”

Sizzling rivalry fodder — except Jacobs made the comments from San Francisco, where he now plays for the 49ers.

The current Giants could only smile. “I’m not going there,” Cruz said when asked about Jacobs’s opinion.

“The Jets are the hometown rival, but we come to play with whoever” was all running back Ahmad Bradshaw would offer on the subject.

When Bennett arrived as a free agent from Dallas, he thought he was joining a team that would receive most of the attention from the fans and news media in the New York metropolitan area, considering the Giants are the defending champions.

“I came here thinking they’d get more respect than they do,” Bennett said. “I don’t think people respect us the way they should. I think that’s the way it’s always been around here.

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Tim Tebow at the Jets training camp.Credit
Suzy Allman for The New York Times

“It seems like the way they like it.”

Bennett has been the team’s most colorful newcomer. He showed up in Albany in a Bentley and, at various times, has compared himself to a black unicorn, Gandhi and Kim Kardashian.

But he said he was beginning to sense that the Giants preferred keeping things on the mild side.

“There are a lot of teams that haven’t won in a long time that get way more attention than we get here,” Bennett said. “But it’s all good. Nobody here really cares. We all just want to prove it on Sunday. I like that. It’s all about football here. It’s not about what everybody thinks about us or anything like that. We do football.”

Quarterback Eli Manning joked earlier in training camp about feeling like the third most popular quarterback in the city, behind Mark Sanchez, the Jets’ starter, and Tebow, Sanchez’s backup. Is he going to use such a slight as motivation on Saturday?

“No, I’m just excited about going against a good team, going against a good defense, and seeing where we stand,” Manning said.

Last week, David Carr, Manning’s backup, joked about taking his shirt off to try to generate more attention, but then added of the Jets’ quarterbacks, “I don’t envy their situation at all.”

“It’s crazy that the defending Super Bowl champs don’t really have a lot of pressure on them,” Carr said. “It’s weird to say that, but we don’t get much attention. That’s our personality. All the other stuff is great for other teams, but we kind of relish the role we’re in.”

At the training facility here, the players sleepily filed into their blue-carpeted locker room Thursday morning. Linebacker Clint Sintim and defensive end Justin Trattou were cut. A few backs remained sore. But the rumor Richter scale hardly flinched.

And in the Giants’ world, no news is good news.

A version of this article appears in print on August 18, 2012, on page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: As Jets Grab Spotlight, Giants Are Happy to Step Aside. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe